The Jasmine Nail Salon

1992, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Mai sneaks a glance at the wall clock, then adjusts her face mask. She considers her client’s cuticles and exhales deeply, but withholds comments. The manager has warned them that the women in this country don’t appreciate chastisement from their nail technicians. Just cut, shape and color, quý cô, no talk!, they’d been instructed.

Mai has noticed that this rule doesn’t apply amongst the girls themselves. They chat endlessly while heads down with clients. Pushing back cuticles. Exfoliating hands. Turning chewed fingernails into works of art. They keep up a constant chatter in Hue, the dialect favored by the part of Vietnam most of the girls originate from. The manager never seems to mind their gossiping though she herself rarely partakes, preferring instead to sit silently behind her cashier’s desk.

Mai walks her client there now, communicating the price of a gel manicure in her accented Dutch. With the manager unexpectedly away for the day, the girls are expected to handle their own customers. Now Mai fumbles with the credit card machine, the low battery sign flashing languidly.

“Ai, where does she keep the other machine?” Mai asks. Kim-Ly nods vaguely in the direction of the drawer just by her, so Mai gives it a tug.

“It’s locked.”

“It’s never locked.”

“Well, it is.”

Kim-Ly lets out a loud mock exhalation, puts down her tools, and walks over. After several attempts, they both admit defeat, writing down the customer’s name, trusting her to follow through on her next visit. Even after Mai has walked back to her seat, Kim-Ly is still shaking her head in confusion.

“Why would she lock this?,” she queries. Some girls shrug, others throw up suggestions, eager to break the monotony with speculation.

“Maybe she has more money in there?”

“…she doesn’t trust us.”

“Or maybe she has more rubbers and doesn’t want us to see.”

Every Vietnamese head in the salon wheels around to confront Bien. With her bleached blonde hair in a ponytail and face-mask cast aside, Bien, usually the slacker, continues to studiously replace her client’s gel manicure.

“Are you joking?”

“No. I found a few in the drawer last week. She’s kept it locked ever since,” says Bien, applying a base layer coat to a thumb.

A burst of chatter as the girls all express their incredulity. The manager isn’t one of them, but this proclamation is a drastic departure from what they had previously imagined. Most of the girls at the salon are around the same age. Old enough to start fresh on a new continent, young enough not to be scarred by a war that had ruined their parents. They’d found the Jasmine Nail Salon through the tight-knit Vietnamese-immigrant network that had existed in the Netherlands since the 1970s. Many had walked into the salon within weeks of entering the country and all of them remember their first meeting with the manager. Only a few years older than some of them, she wore áo dàis daily, the traditional dress all the girls had quickly shed in favor of casual jeans and baggy sweaters. The manager smelled like gardenias and wore her hair in the old-fashioned manner of women from the central provinces — long, jet-black and down to her hips. The girls mocked her in conversation, but privately, they each respected her homage to the life they’d left behind.

“Maybe it’s because of that Dutch man Mai and I saw her with at the pho restaurant last week?” suggest Bien again, this time looking up to revel in attention of the room.

She ignores Mai’s side-eye, aware she has broken their pact in favor of being the bearer of such salacious gossip.

The girls sit in stunned silence. They work mechanically to cut, shape and color, their clients oblivious to the changed atmosphere and the letter each girl is mentally crafting to send home to their families back in Hue, Vietnam.